Bronx Landlord Gets Jail Time for Violations

February 20, 2008

This video is pretty tough to watch if you are bothered by poor folks forced to live in squalor, or if you’re bothered by the conventions of TV news journalism. But the building condition is pretty appalling. And now its owner is facing jail time. So you don’t even have to watch it at all (but there are literally holes in the floor).

A Bronx landlord was sentenced to nine days in jail and fined $156,000 for failing to address 2,268 open violations at his building on 1055 Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard, the city Department of Housing Preservation & Development said on Wednesday.

The landlord, Hamid Khan, signed orders in 2006 and 2007 to correct the violations—collapsed floors and ceilings, water damage, broken fire escapes—but never much to fix it. So now he’ll spend nine days in the lockup for criminal and civil contempt—becoming the first landlord jailed for housing violations since 2006.

But advocates for the homeless point out that the city Department of Homeless Services had been paying Khan thousands a month last year for giving “shelter” to homeless people in his decrepit building as part of the now defunct Housing Stability Plus program.